Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division

Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration

Clarksdale, Mississippi

Life in the South offered few opportunities beyond the cotton fields, and conditions on the plantations were often reminiscent of the nineteenth century. Christine Welch, who was born on a farm and picked cotton as a teenager, summed up her view of race relations in her native Tennessee: "If a white man can't work you like a dog, like slavery times, he hates you." - Charles Denby, Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).